Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers of materials over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allows more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that utilize less area than the packages of the past, in some applications.
During the manufacturing of integrated circuits, photoresist material is placed on top of a semiconductor wafer in desired patterns and is removed afterwards to remove the surrounding material not covered by the resist pattern, in order to obtain the desired features. However, a back side of the wafer may be damaged during removal of the photoresist material over a front side of the wafer. In addition, chuck marks may be formed on the back side of the wafer during various fabrication processes. Therefore, there are many challenges related to protecting the back side of the wafer.